Message text written by Ruth Barton
>Know anyone who wants  to buy an 1890s house in a small rural Vermont
village?<

Ruth,

I have thought that your part of Vermont might be a place I would want to
live since I passed through there on the Preservation Sourcebook Road Trip
1998. I had left DC in the Great Pumpkin (1970 Morgan) on July 10th, 1998,
driving to Buffalo, NY in the first day. My brother in East Amherst was
hosting a family gathering and that was the only car I had then that could
make the trip. And I needed to get out of town. I took a newly-purchased
laptop and a box of Sourcebooks and told the publisher I had to leave town
before I went crazy and killed someone. Let her guess who that might be. I
stayed in Buffalo a week or so, making ad calls and visiting some of the
people there i knew by hone from PSB, then headed across NY state. Stopped
in Bennington (I was trying to get a job with Hemmings Motor News at the
time). Except for one guy in Buffalo who was driving an MG and of course
the people at HMN, not one person could identify the car i was driving. I
got all the usual questions--is it a kitcar, an MG, an Austin-Healey (I
don't know why this is a very common misidentification since no Healey ever
looked anything like a Morgan) bu no one knew what it was. Then as I was at
the stoplight in Brattleboro, having come in from the west and waiting to
turn left (north) toward Putney, two young women crossed the street. As I
was first in line they crossed behind the car. One of them looked at the
name on the back (one of three places where the name is visible on the car)
and said to her friend, "See, I told you that was a Morgan." As they
disappeared into the convenience store oin the corner, I resisted the
impulse to pursue them. It;'s a great place, I thought, where comely young
women know what a Morgan is. Civilization at last. I could live here. Later
that day one of the craftspersons in Putney (I forget his name, but he is
from Annapolis where i lived many years, and his father was sailing coach
at the Naval Academy around the time mine was saiing coach at the Coast
Guard Academy) described the area as "rural cosmopolitan--the kind of place
where the carpenters have PhDs and the general store carries the NY Times."
Sounded like about what I was looking for. 

Although I have New England ancestry and was born there, and like to say I
am from there, I haven't lived there since I was in the 8th grade, so it is
an alien culture. Military brats such as myself have this problem. I find
the DC area agreeable in one sense, that being from somewhere else is not a
problem because almost everyone I meet is too. And I do like the diversity.
But I have never really made the decision to stay here, it's just a habit.
Like many people here, I always maintain the idea that eventually i will go
elsewhere, once I figure out where that should be. And I stay here--almost
15 years now. But moving to New England is never far from my thoughts. This
is the time of year when i think of it most, because I hate the heat. Then
the fall starts, which is the best time of year here, and we have mild
winters when i can even drive the Morgan occasionally, and so I stay. The
winter here, though, is ugly compared to a New England winter-gray and
bleak with nothing good to make up for it. Days too short, weather too
cold, but not pretty at all. One of the agents in my office, Ceceilia
Lofton, is from the Brattleboro area and only sold her house there last
year. She likes being from there (her accent is very distinctive in our
office), likes the cold--it's an ongoing complaint that she likes it 10
degrees cooler in the office than anyone else does--but says this area is
much better. 

In New England a Morgan is a car to drive maybe 3 months of the year; here
it's a three season car (and even in winter I might take it out once a
month). That's good and bad. Good because I get to keep driving it, bad
because I never want to do any work on it that would make it undriveable
for long since there's always another nice day to drive it. But the driving
conditions here are not all that nice. If I want to drive on a nice country
road, it can take an hour to get to one. Starting and ending any long road
trip is brutal. 

Don

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